Chapter 11
The Lawyer on Harcourt Square
Harcourt Square was a Georgian rectangle of soot-dark brick around a railed garden of plane trees, and in the thin sunshine of Monday afternoon it looked like a place where nothing had ever happened.
Amara stood on the pavement and looked up at the number. It was a tall, flat-fronted house with white sash windows and a black door, and beside the door, on a brass plate polished almost to invisibility by two hundred years of housemaids, a row of names: two firms of solicitors, an accountancy practice, a chambers. And at the bottom, engraved smaller than the rest, as if it had been added in a hurry and meant to be taken away again: ANSELM & DREW. Criminal & Regulatory. By appointment only.
She had not made an appointment. She had rung the number on the back of the note from the doorway of a chemist's, with the wind snatching at the phone, and a clipped tired voice had said, Anselm, and then, when Amara had said who she was, nothing at all, for so long that she thought the line had gone dead. Then the voice had said, in a different register, quietly: Where are you? Stay there. No. Come to me. Come now. Don't take a taxi, walk. And Mrs. Hale. Look behind you once or twice. Not often. Just to know.
She had looked. She had seen nobody. That, she supposed, was the point.
She pressed the bell.
The door buzzed and clicked. A narrow hall, a black-and-white tiled floor, a flight of stairs with a worn red runner. At the foot of them, behind a low desk, a young man with a lanyard and a nervous expression looked up from a monitor and said, "Mrs. Hale?"
"How do you know my name?"
"Ms. Anselm's been expecting you." He swallowed. "She said you'd come. She said it might be a week. She said, if a lady in a black coat turns up, ring her at once."
"She said that?"
"She's not herself, Mrs. Hale." He lowered his voice. "She's been here since Saturday. She hasn't gone home."
Ruth Anselm's room was on the third floor, at the back, and it looked as if it had been lived in by a siege.
Every surface was piled with paper. Files stood in leaning towers on the floor, on the radiator, on the arms of the chairs. A whiteboard on the wall was covered in names and dates joined by arrows in four colors of marker, a great red-and-blue web, dense and furious, like the diagram of a brain. A kettle sat on the windowsill beside a heap of dead teabags and a tin of shortbread. And behind a desk the size of a door, in a high-backed leather chair with the stuffing coming out of one arm, a woman sat still with both hands flat on the blotter, watching Amara come in.
She was about sixty. She was small and square and rather fierce, with a cap of cropped silver hair and a long pale clever face and black-rimmed spectacles pushed up into it. She wore a black suit that had been slept in and a gray silk scarf. There were deep violet hollows under her eyes. A cup of tea stood at her elbow, untouched, with a skin on it. And she did not get up. She looked at Amara across the whole length of the cluttered room, for what felt like a full minute, with an expression that was neither welcome nor suspicion but something much stranger, a sort of terrible exhausted hunger, like a woman at the end of a long watch.
"You're the wife," she said.
"Yes."
"You look like him." She said it flatly, as one reads a label. "You don't, of course. But you carry yourself like him. I noticed it in the door. Please sit down."
Amara sat. The chair was hard and low. She put her bag on her knees and held it, as if it might get away.
"I'm Ruth Anselm. I believe you've guessed why you're here." The lawyer took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I'm sorry for your loss, Mrs. Hale. I would say that I'm sorry for your husband's, but I'm not sure that you would thank me. I shall say instead that I am more sorry than I can say."
"You knew him."
"I met him twice. In August, and again on the twentieth of September. He came here in the evening, by the back stair, with his collar up. He sat in that chair." Ruth Anselm's mouth moved. "He was the most frightened man I have ever represented. And the most courteous. He apologized for the state of his shoes."
"What did he want?"
"To give evidence."
The word fell into the cluttered air like a stone into a pond. Outside the window a pigeon waddled along the sill, preening, and from somewhere in the street below a van began to reverse with a long insistent bleat.
"About what?" said Amara. Her voice sounded strange to her, thin and high.
"About Victor Crane."
She had thought she was ready. She had said the name over to herself on the train, in a whisper, to the window. And still it went into her like cold water, a small hard physical shock, so that she felt her hands tighten on the clasp of her bag.
"I know about Crane," she said. "Martin Ashby told me. He's the friend, he's my husband's, he was my husband's partner. He said Daniel borrowed from him. In ninety-eight. He said there was a debt."
"Did he."
It was not a question. It lay flat on the desk between them, quiet and sharp as a blade laid down on a cloth.
"He said six hundred and twelve thousand pounds."
"Did he say how it was calculated?"
"He said it was what the ledger said."
"Whose ledger?"
Amara opened her mouth and shut it.
"I'm going to tell you a number," said Ruth Anselm. "I would like you to sit very still while I do. Your husband borrowed two hundred and sixty thousand pounds from Victor Crane in the October of 1998. He paid him, by his own record, in cash, in carrier bags and shoeboxes and the lining of a coat, on the first Friday of every month for eight years, a little over four hundred thousand pounds. He paid it with a stolen set of customs papers on his conscience and a stone in his pocket. By his own arithmetic, at the rate of interest Crane charges, and he did the sum on this desk, with a pencil, he owed, on the fifth of October, twelve thousand pounds. Give or take."
"Twelve."
"Twelve thousand, one hundred and some. He was going to pay it. He had the cash in a plastic bag. He had drawn it the week before." The solicitor's eyes held hers. "And then Mr. Ashby, who is the man you say told you the figure, was, I think, kind enough to reconcile it."
Amara did not move.
"I'm not saying it is Mr. Ashby. I want to be very clear. I'm not saying anything. I'm a lawyer; I deal in what I can prove." The silver head tilted. "I'm telling you that I have a number in my head that is twelve thousand, and a number in yours that is six hundred and twelve, and that those two numbers cannot both be true. And I would very much like to know who is in the gap."
She had expected, she thought, to be shown a file.
She had not expected tea. But Ruth Anselm got up, stiffly, a small bent figure, and put the kettle on, and stood with her back to the room, measuring tea into a pot with a precision that was almost prayer, and while the water boiled she began to talk. She talked as lawyers do when they have rehearsed a speech in the dark and are letting it out for the first time, quietly, in a low continuous flow, without raising her eyes.
She told how Daniel Hale had come to see her in August, with a story that she did not at first believe. He had told her of a waterfront in Dunmarrow where certain things were done by certain men. He had told her about cigarettes, a hundred thousand a month, off the ships of one particular line, under paper that said they were destined for Rotterdam and had never left the quay. He had told her of the men who drove the lorries, and the officer of customs who looked the other way, and the long grey office at the end of Gaunt's Wharf where a courteous old man in a camel coat counted money. He had told her all of it in a quiet level voice, with his hands flat on his knees, as a man reads his own obituary.
"He had names," she said. "Dates. The numbers of lorries. The name of a priest who held a safe. He had, I think, two thousand pages of it. In his head, mostly. And in a book of his own."
"What book?"
"I never saw it. He called it his true ledger. He told me it was the only record in the world of what had actually passed hand to hand, in what month, to whom. The other books, the ones the firm kept, were, in his word, managed. He said there were two sets and that only one of them was lies, and that if I wanted to understand the case I should look for the place where the two sets stopped agreeing." She poured the water. "I asked where it was. He said somewhere safe. He said, I've put it where nobody would look for it, because nobody would think it was worth the trouble. I said I'd need it, for a case. And he smiled. He had the most extraordinary smile. He said, My wife would find it in a minute."
Amara sat quite still.
"I thought it was a joke," said Ruth Anselm, and put a cup into her hands. "I don't think it was."
The tea was hot and strong. She held it without drinking. She was thinking of a small brass key on a paper tag, and a luggage label, and the three letters and numbers on it. H.S. 114. A self-storage firm. A place where somebody would think it was not worth the trouble.
"He was going to come here on Friday," said Amara.
"At eleven. With a detective chief inspector from the Serious Fraud office, whom I'd spent six weeks persuading to take the meeting. A very nice man called Burroughs. He waited for him until half past twelve." The solicitor sat down. "I rang the flat. I rang the mobile. I rang your house, but I got a machine, and I did not leave a message, because he had said, Never leave a name. I thought, he's had second thoughts. I thought, he's a man who has been frightened for eight years and has finally lost his nerve. And I went home that night and wrote him a rather cross letter."
She stopped.
"I heard on Saturday. From a friend in the force. I thought, I killed him. I thought, if I had been firmer, if I had sent a car."
"You didn't."
"No."
"Who did?"
"I don't know." The lawyer looked at her. "I know who would like it to have been natural. I know who would like the papers found and the debt collected and the whole business brought to a quiet decent close, with the widow weeping at the graveside and signing what she is given. I know whom that suits. I do not know who put the needle in."
"The needle."
Ruth Anselm's face did not change. But Amara saw something move behind her eyes: a quick, hard, sorrowful flicker, like a bird crossing a window.
"I'm sorry," said the solicitor. "I heard it from the friend. The pathologist found, there is a mark. I should not have said."
"I saw it," said Amara. "On the body. Below the ribs. The size of a pinhead."
"Then you know more than I do."
They sat for an hour. The light moved on the whiteboard. The clock in the hall struck three.
She learned, in that hour, that the law was a smaller thing than she had imagined and a much more solid one. A debt incurred by a dead man was a debt against his estate: his house, his shares, his firm. It did not fall upon a wife. It could not, unless she had put her own name to it. "And you did not," said Ruth Anselm. "You told me so, in the first two minutes, with the most beautiful economy. You were in Nigeria. A forged signature on a deed of charge is a crime, Mrs. Hale, and it is also, I should tell you, a rather good ground for setting the whole charge aside. I could have it before a judge within the month."
"They'll say my husband forged it."
"They will say so. I don't think they will be able to prove it. A man in the grip of a loan shark is capable of many things, but I don't believe your husband would have signed your name to a bond and told you nothing. Do you?"
"No."
"Then somebody else did."
"Who?"
"Somebody who knew you would be abroad on the twelfth of March. Somebody who had access to a good specimen of your hand." She lifted a finger. "Don't answer. Think about it. You may find the circle is not a large one."
"But it won't help," said Amara. "Will it. The law. It doesn't touch him."
"No."
"He's not going to take it to a judge."
"No." Ruth Anselm took off her spectacles and laid them on the blotter. "Victor Crane has never in forty years taken a debt to court. It would be, to him, an indecency. He has other ways. They are generally quiet. There is a man who comes. And then another man. A house is burned, or a lorry, or a dog is found in a car park. The person concerned finds that he has, after all, decided to sell. And pays." The pale eyes held hers. "You've had thirty days, I take it."
"From the burial."
"It will be, what, the nineteenth of November."
"Yes."
"Then I will tell you what I would tell any woman who sat in that chair. I will tell you not to pay him a penny. I will tell you to give me what your husband left, and let me take it to Burroughs, and let the police do what they are for. And then I will tell you that I do not believe you will do any of it, because you have a sister in a hospital and a mother in Enugu Road and a house that you love, and he knows where each of them is."
Amara said nothing. She was staring at the whiteboard. In its top right corner, set a little apart from the rest, with a red question mark beside it, there was a single name. M. ASHBY (acct.). A line ran from it to CRANE. A second line, much lighter, in pencil, ran from it to D.H. She read it three times. It did not seem to say anything. It said only: here is a man who is standing between two others.
"You've written him down," she said.
"I write everybody down."
"You don't trust him."
"I don't know him. He's a name in a letter. Your husband said, once, in September, There's one man who knows every figure. I have to speak to him before I do this. He deserves to hear it from me. I said, who? He wouldn't say. He said, a friend." Ruth Anselm looked at her very steadily. "Mrs. Hale. I want you to listen to me. Whoever the friend was, your husband went to see him on the Wednesday. The third. He told me so on the phone that night. He said, I've told him. He took it better than I expected. And two days later he was dead."
She came out into the square at a quarter to four.
The sun had gone behind a long bank of cloud. The wind had risen. The plane trees in the railed garden were shaking out their last leaves in slow golden handfuls, and across the street a woman with a pram was crossing, and a man was hammering at a window, and the whole ordinary brightness of the afternoon seemed to Amara as thin and fragile as a pane of glass with a crack running through it.
She stood on the step. She had a card in her pocket with a number on it. She had a promise, made in a low voice, to ring on Wednesday. She had been told to go home, and lock the doors, and say nothing, and she meant to, with the whole force of her will. And she had a small brass key against her thigh.
Her mobile buzzed.
She took it out. It was a text. It had come from a number she did not know, a long string of digits, and it consisted of two lines, in the stiff correct punctuation of a man who did not trust a telephone to do it for him.
Mr. Crane would be honoured to receive you tomorrow at eleven. A car will call at Marsh Lane at nine. There is no need to bring anything. S. Rook.
She read it twice.
It was not a threat. That was what made her blood stop. Every word of it was courteous. It was the sort of note that one might get from a head waiter. Honoured. No need to bring anything. She stood on the cold step in the dying light, with the plane leaves blowing past her feet, and understood quite calmly, with a clearness that astonished her, that he had known all along where she was going to be; that he knew this house, and that door, and the name on the brass plate; that a long black coat had been, perhaps, a little behind her every minute since the train.
A car will call at Marsh Lane.
He knew where she lived. He had always known.
She looked up. At the third-floor window, behind the white sash, a small gray figure was standing with its arms folded, looking down at her: Ruth Anselm, still, in the afternoon light, like a woman at the rail of a ship watching a boat go out. She raised one hand. It was not a wave. It was a kind of benediction, or a warning. Then she turned and was gone.
Amara put the phone away. She pulled up her collar. And she walked out of Harcourt Square into the gray roar of the city, with her head high and her heart going like a drum, and she did not look behind her, because she had understood at last that there was no longer any need.